India bids to hunt Einstein's space-time ripples

India may soon join the worldwide effort to find space-time ripples. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently told the Indian Science Congress that his nation intends to host a crucial part of the world's largest gravitational wave observatory.

Both are being upgraded but the international LIGO team has been scouting for a third site, which would allow them to triangulate and locate the sources of gravitational waves. This is important for other radio, optical, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes so they can follow up observations of these cosmic events with their own observation.

Seismic silence

The two existing LIGO detectors could work with the European Gravitational Observatory's VIRGO detector in Italy to do this. However, such triangulation works best when the three detectors on Earth form a plane below the source, as opposed to being in the same plane as the source.

The two LIGO plus VIRGO detectors would form such a plane beneath about one-fifth of the sources LIGO is sensitive enough to detect, says LIGO chief scientist Stan Whitcomb at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Add a third LIGO site in India and you open up much more of the sky, increasing the fraction to 80 per cent. "It's a fantastic scientific opportunity," he says. "If we can bring this about, it advances the field of gravitational waves by a decade compared to where it would be without LIGO-India."

Gravity excites

The site must also be seismically quiet and able to house two 4-kilometre-long arms: several areas in India fit the bill.

Gravitational wave physicists in India are hopeful. "Those people are extremely excited," says Kembhavi. "It gives a completely new dimension to have your own data, your own experiment."

The Indian government now just has to give its final approval.

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